A newbie with a cool idea

[Your Computer]

Ok just to be clear, I can't make the enemy open up closets & do other advanced searches in rooms or make him tear down our box/barrel forts, correct? What about random search paths? Like do I have to put down path nodes everywhere to make it look random?

You can suggest for the monster to break down closet doors by having it attempt to walk into a closed closet (though i'm not 100% certain if closet doors are breakable). You could have an area in front of the closet and when the monster collides with it, automatically open the closet door. If an object is breakable and the AI realizes that it is in the way of the monster with no where else to go, the AI may attempt to break the object on its own. Random search paths are possible, but you have to make sure each node is connected to each other in order for the monster to navigate to its destination. There's a function you can use to generate a random number which you can then prefix with a predefined pathnode name (if you understand what i mean).